SES San Jose

I found my way to San Jose this morning to attend Search Engine Strategies. My flight departed early so I had to get up at 4:30am…so yeah, I’m kind of in a bad mood.

So far I’ve only attended one session. It was regarding Universal/Blended Search.
Moderator:

Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose

Speakers:

Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online

Bill Slawski, Director of Search Marketing, Commerce360

Q&A Speakers:

Erik Collier, Director of Product Management, Ask.com

David Bailey, Engineer, Google

Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Mostly, the various search engines discussed how they see the future of blended search evolving. Obviously the engines want to include more and more content (video, images, etc) to keep users in front of their ads.

Some stuff to look for:

Google News currently only provides text and images. Video should be available soon.

Google Universal search will begin to shuffle features in the SERPs. For example, (as of 8/20/2007) a search for “Alex McArthur” returns 3 pictures of the actor and 10 standard web results. If a video or blog post about Alex McArthur became popular in the future, then a Google Onebox result may be added to the first SERP page.

Third party videos showing up in blended search results.

Erik Collier, from Ask.com, reported a 30% drop of searchers going to second page as a result of blended search. Also, a 15% drop on searchers performing more than 1 query. According to Erik this means that people are finding what they want quicker.
*2nd page just won’t cut it any more. ;-)